E-SUPPLEMENT TO THE JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL AND RELIGIOUS THEORY
Georges Bataille, The Limit of the Useful. Translated and edited by Corey Austin Knudson and Tomas Elliott. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2022. Hardback. 360 pages. ISBN 978-0-262-04733-3. The Accursed Share, one of the more enduring literary and philosophical projects undertaken by Georges Bataille, started a decade before its eventual 1949 publication as what he had […]
Giorgio Agamben. What is Real? Trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. 88 pages. ISBN: 978-1-5036-0737-8 Every mysterious disappearance assumes mythical tones, the subsequent fate of the missing person remaining indefinitely suspended when concrete and sufficient information is lacking: perhaps a second life somewhere far away, under an identity as new as false, as […]
Mark I. Wallace. When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. 240 pages. ISBN-10: 0823281310. A simple two-bedroom house sits along a busy street in a suburban neighborhood in the Midwest during the warmer months. Across the street there is a line of non-descript utility […]
Joseph Walser, Genealogies of Mahāyāna Buddhism: Emptiness, Power, and the Question of Origin. Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2018. 288 pages. IBSN: 978-1-13-895556-1. . Since Talal Asad’s landmark work Genealogies of Religion, some scholars in the humanities have slowly begun to consider the relation between power and religion. But the same cannot be said about […]
William Desmond, The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity Among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics. Columbia University Press, 2016. 520 pages. ISBN 9780231178761 Illustrating the constrictions of the received metaphysical legacy, the intimate as a universal seeks a space between the typical contrasts of the notion of particulars and universals, or the immanent and transcendent. Desmond […]
Joshua Ramey and Matthew S. Haar Farris (Eds.), Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. 299 pages. ISBN: 9781786601414 The volume edited by Ramey and Haar Farris is a compendium of, for the most part, high theory experimental writings. The volume collects reworked papers […]
Ciccariello-Maher, George. Decolonizing Dialectics. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 256 pages. ISBN-10: 0822362430. Hardcover, paperback, e-book. “Truly to escape Hegel,” Michele Foucault warns, “involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him.” Considering that price, George Ciccariello-Maher has decided that Hegel’s methodological legacy –– the dynamic movement of conflictive […]
Inventing Afterlives: The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Life After Death. Janes, Regina M. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2018. 384 pages. ISBN: 9780231185714. Why do we form beliefs about the afterlife? What cultural work do these beliefs perform? In her beautifully written, learned book, Inventing Afterlives, Regina Janes proposes answers to these questions. […]
Neurotheology: How Science Can Enlighten Us About Spirituality. Newberg, Andrew. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. ISBN 9780231179041. Hardback. 321 pages. Andrew Newberg’s Neurotheology is a book of questions: why are some people religious and others not? Does religion have an impact on health and well-being? What is the difference between religion and spirituality? Can […]
Balboni, Michael J. and Peteet, John R. eds. Spirituality and Religion Within the Culture of Medicine: From Evidence to Practice. Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press 2017. ISBN 9780190272432 Hardcover. 419 pages. Several genres of writing stereotypically intersect with the topics of medicine and religion: empirical studies of religion’s impact on various […]